Customer Reviews

Color Conscious

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This is a terrific book. In clear and persuasive terms, Appiah begins the book by explaining how "race" is a fiction, but "racism" is a fact. This seeming paradox presents the difficult challenge that Gutmann then addresses in the second half of the book. On one hand, she recognizes that social justice seems to require that we not define people in terms of their so-called "race." On the other hand, she also shows how social justice demands that we eradicate racism, especially insofar as it affects people's civic life. This leads to the central problem of the book: If we don't take account of people's race, how can we respond to the social injustices stemming from racism?

Gutmann makes a powerful case why fairness demands that we be "color conscious," at least for some purposes and for the time-being. She also explains why class-consciousness cannot resolve the problems stemming from racism, nor can proportional representation based on race.

These conclusions may raise the hackles of those who believe that our country should be color-blind, but the arguments that lead there are carefully constructed, logical, and in the end, largely persuasive. Moreover, they are chock-full of concrete examples that drive home the theoretical points. Whether she is talking about the attributes of a successful program in affirmative action at AT&T or data on S.A.T. scores analyzed by both race and class, Gutmann makes a powerful case from which even honest critics will have much to learn.

Both Appiah's and Gutmann's arguments are nuanced, theoretically sophistocated, and informative. Moreover, they are a pleasure to read. Gutmann's essay, in particular, has an impressive style in that it uses concrete examples to illustrate her theoretical points, as well as solid theoretical arguments to illuminate thorny areas of public policy. Wilkins' introduction and Appiah's epilogue are also well-written and valuable. This book is important reading for all people interested in responding to racial injustice.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1955) is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist who is currently Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also author of books such as In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Amy Gutmann (born 1949) is the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Political Science, Communications, and Philosophy. She taught at Princeton University from 1976 to 2004 and served as its Provost.

In this 1996 book, Appiah writes a section on "Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections," and Gutmann writes a section on "Responding to Racial Injustice"; Appiah then contributes an Epilogue.

Here are some quotations from the book:

"This is because, as we shall see, the arguments against the use of 'race' as a scientific term suggest that most ordinary ways of thinking about races are incoherent." (Pg. 42)
"It follows that on an ideational view, there are no biological races, either: not, in this case, because nothing fits the loose criteria but because too many things do." (Pg. 72)
"I have insisted that African-Americans do not have a single culture, in the sense of shared language, values, practices, and meanings. But many people who think of races as groups defined by shared cultures, conceive that sharing in a different way... Jazz belongs to a black person who knows nothing about it more fully than it does to a white jazzman." (Pg. 90)
"African-American identity, as I have argued, is centrally shaped by American society and institutions: it cannot be seen as constructed solely within African-American communities. African-American culture, if this means shared beliefs, values, practices, does not exist: what exists are African-American cultures..." (Pg. 95)

Amy Gutman argues that racial quotas are needed because of racial discrimination. There is some truth to this: for example, the Nixon administration invented quotas to fight blatant discrimination by craft unions in Philadelphia, and it's hard to imagine any other tactic working to end discrimination by unions devoted to enforcing anti-competitive, nepotistic hiring. Unfortunately, Gutman makes no attempt to distinguish anti-competitive organizations from competitive ones, which have economic incentives to not discriminate. In fact, I don't think Gutman is even aware of the distinction. She merely assumes that if blacks are under-represented anywhere, it's because of discrimination. Well, we've certainly heard that before, so what's the point of writing another book if you're just going to repeat the same old dogmas?

Appiah, on the other hand, is a more open and intriguing thinker. This may stem from the near-comic ironies of his position in life. He is a Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, but he's not very Afro-American. He was born in Ghana of a local father and an English mother. He has spent a lot of his career arguing that "race" has no biological "essence," but is just a social construct.

It's not hard for him to knock down the absurd strawmen he sets up. He assumes that if there is no Platonic essence to each race, and that if each member of each race can't be perfectly identified, the whole concept of race must be discarded. Of course, reality is not Platonic, it's relativistic and probabilistic. It's humorously hypocritical for a relativist like Appiah to denounce the concept of race just because it's relativistic.

For example, all his criticisms of the concept of race apply with equal, if not greater, force to the concept of family. Nobody can agree on the precise numbers of races? Nobody can agree on the precise number of extended families either. Are some people descended from more than one race? Well, everybody is descended from more than one family. There's no single gene that proves you belong to one race or another? Well, there's no single gene that proves you are your father's child either. Paternity testers examine a host of genes in order to increase the probability of a correct attribution. (In fact, the exact same DNA techniques are used by forensic scientists to inform police of the probable race of criminal who left a bloodstain at the crime scene.)

Why does family provide so many perfect analogies for race? Because they aren't analogies: a race is an extremely extended family. There are no hard and fast borders between families and races -- the only qualitative difference is that races show a degree of endogamy (in-breeding), which means that races are actually somewhat more coherent and definite, and less fuzzy than families.

Dr Neil Risch, of Stanford, has shown that by analyzing DNA, can correctly match an individual's self-described race in 99.9 per cent of cases. There was a greater chance, he said, that researchers would incorrectly guess an individual's self-described gender.

There are readily identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268-275, 2005.)

This clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa.

Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.

This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:

Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.

Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.

Appiah and Gutmann (A&G) want to arrive at the conclusion that America's blacks should be given plenty of quotas, preferences or at least pots of money; but they do not actually accept that blacks are a racial group having any special needs. Their book is replete with assurances that "the only human race in the USA....is the human race" (p. 32); that "I think there aren't [any races]" (p. 33); that there are no races at all (p. 117); and that race is a "dangerous fiction" (p. 176).

Despite generous page space, it is unclear just how A&G have decided on this self-denying ordinance that must forever cramp their style - especially since they have no reparations to propose for Amerindians. What is stopping A&G from estimating how many people are black and what actually are their characteristic problems? One might expect argument about the number of main racial groupings found in the USA -- even if the final answer has to be 'one' -- to proceed by considering expert definitions, by looking at empirical clustering, or by tracing lines of descent. More engagingly, authors like A&G might be expected to try to do battle with race realists like Phil Rushton (1995, 'Race, Evolution and Behavior') who claim it is convenient to identify three main racial groups (African, Asian, Caucasian) in the world as a whole and in America likewise.

Yet no such healthy process of argument and consideration ever begins in Colour Conscious. Simply, Rushton is not given a mention. Just as Harvard's top leftist, S. J. Gould, prefers to concentrate his critical fire on psychological positions of a century ago, so Appiah derives amusement from the concern with skin colour and 'White beauty' of the USA's "race theorist" and founding father, William Jefferson (e.g. 1781-2, 'Notes on the State of Virginia'). Apparently, anything is preferable to taking on Arthur Jensen's suggestion of the 1990's that 95% of people in the world can be conveniently said to belong to one of some six main groups (Whitney, 1999, American Renaissance, March). (Jensen was to be well supported by Chinese research which used 'microsatellites' [repeats of short DNA segments] to test human genetic variability and produced a picture of ten main types racial grouping and descent, merely recognizing more differentiation within Jensen's Oriental groups - Piazza, 1998, Nature, 15 October.) Even the geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza who works so hard to persuade the media that there are no races is mentioned by A&G only in a one-sentence footnote. Herrnstein and Murray's 'The Bell Curve' receives virtually the same neglectful treatment - with just a page from A&G deploring the "fuss" about the book and asserting there is "almost no evidence relevant to refuting the claim that the differences between American groups are entirely caused by the environment...."

Presumably there is a reason for A&G's avoidance of straight scholarly argument about race - and especially about the worldwide association between negritude and high rates of mental retardation, violent crime, illiteracy, promiscuity, single parenting and venereal disease. Avoidance of the sobering realities that might explain old-fashioned racism is plainly thought by A&G to be their safest course.